Disk archival techniques

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Fred Cisin wrote:

> While the goal is certainly simple (to be able to generate duplicates
> of odd diskettes without requiring human manual intervention), there
> does not exist a method of describing a disk format in a practical way,
> that does not require SOME manual handling of exceptions.
>
> Although the number of exceptions is theoretically finite,
> for ANY proposed specification, one or more of us can come
> up with an exception.  Therefore, it remains necessary to
> retain a "comment" field to be able to specify additional
> "weirdities", especially if the spec is to be opened up
> enough to deal with "copy protected" disks.

Not only will FK allow comments, it should also allow exceptions to be
specified in a manner that can be algorithmically processed.

> OTOH, it would be gross overkill to store the complete bitstream
> without clock separation of every track on disks that could be
> defined as "5.25 DSDD 48TPI WD/IBM 5SPT 1024BPS, no known oddities",
> just because SOME (a few thousand) disk formats DO have strange
> things to deal with.

Right, and the FK spec allows imaging at different levels (from flux
transitions to fully interpreted filesystems).

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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